Ashes

[treeguy]

I have a small shrine to it in my shed

Do you use Bone Char?

 

[DirtMechanic]

Do you use Bone Char?

No. Our soil always has a high P so it is not something I would consider generally, although it sounds interesting under a tomato?

 

[treeguy]

To me, the P is incidental, it's the C with unlimited available reaction sites that is what I'm after. It IS nice to not buy bone meal anymore, ~always overpriced. I will attach a string of .pdf files that I have assembled to tell the story. Back around the turn of the century I had to buy the dust that they swept-up off the floor in charcoal mills. It cost more to ship than the value of the product and had no P content to speak of. Now I can buy Bone Char used to make sugar white and many other industrial ways and is available at some elevators, ~$25/40 lb bag. I use about one bag per year.

This all started for me somewhere around 2000 when I watched a NPR show about Francisco de Orellana, and the origin of El Dorado. Some time later, I ran across an anthropology article about South American Amerindians and Terra Preta de Indio, and had an epiphany. Over time I collected Links to like articles, some of which Links now abandoned, so I captured what I could and made them into .pdf's so I could still pass this background on to people interested in soil science (at a gardener's level). Sooner, or later this will become real science and change the way we farm for the better. Anything that changes slash-and-burn to slash-and-char will be welcome by everyone.

 

[DirtMechanic]

Now I can buy Bone Char used to make sugar white and many other industrial ways and is available at some elevators, ~$25/40 lb bag. I use about one bag per year.

Please explain. industrial ways? what is sugar white or is that the bleaching result?

 

[treeguy]

Please explain. industrial ways? what is sugar white or is that the bleaching result?

Sugar comes from beets and cane. Cane sugar needs to be processed with Bone Char to make it white. Otherwise, charcoal is a filtering medium.

 

[DirtMechanic]

Sugar comes from beets and cane. Cane sugar needs to be processed with Bone Char to make it white. Otherwise, charcoal is a filtering medium.

I have considered sugar up to the point that the remnants of molasses are used on soil. It intrigues my mind to go on the other side. So this word you keep using..char.. are they burning or boiling first? After that?

 

[treeguy]

I have considered sugar up to the point that the remnants of molasses are used on soil. It intrigues my mind to go on the other side. So this word you keep using..char.. are they burning or boiling first? After that?

Bone Char is charcoal made from renderings, bones. I think (but don't know) that it is one type of "activated charcoal" without going through the final (extra) steps that convert Charcoal from wood into activated charcoal by removing the chemical residues that are resident in wood: resins, etc., because cows don't have resin in their bones. Because activated charcoal has empty space where the resins have been burned out, it has massive internal surface area and is used to filter water chemicals or air by passing smaller molecules through and holding big ones, and/or by attracting and bonding to some molecules while passing all others. It gets a lot more complicated than that and I'm already in over my head.

 

[DirtMechanic]

Bone Char is charcoal made from renderings, bones. I think (but don't know) that it is one type of "activated charcoal" without going through the final (extra) steps that convert Charcoal from wood into activated charcoal by removing the chemical residues that are resident in wood: resins, etc., because cows don't have resin in their bones. Because activated charcoal has empty space where the resins have been burned out, it has massive internal surface area and is used to filter water chemicals or air by passing smaller molecules through and holding big ones, and/or by attracting and bonding to some molecules while passing all others. It gets a lot more complicated than that and I'm already in over my head.

Yes. Activated charcoal does have a large surface area and can be made by burning wood or other organic matter, but it is more than important to note the temperature must be north of 700C. In F that is basically 1300f. Glass would begin to melt and already be soft and flowing. The reason I point this out is that you mentioned Terra Preta in a previous post. In that scenerio, such temperatures may have existed only in a communal bonfire, but certainly not in enough situations to produce the breadth and depth of the carbon found so deep and over such a large area. So how did that cookfire charcoal become an "activated" equivalent? Oxidation. The same process that makes your car rust. So given time, it works to the same end to use charcoal even if not activated. Particles that are not part of the carbon matrix will be oxidized and lifted from the stable structure over time, and since the remaining carbon structure charges are negative and attract things like oxygen, and the surface area is large, good things happen in the soil.

 

[treeguy]

I concur. Activated is totally ready, now, but ordinary char can degrade bit-by-bit from the outside surfaces and be oxidized over time just fine. Activated has more surface pound-for-pound, but as long as the volume of charcoal available is higher than whatever amount is being utilized year-to-year, the process goes on accumulating. Assuming more than ample rainfall, maybe the limiting factor in the Amazon basin would be the mineral content of the soil rather than the availability of carbon? Given a couple thousand years of the practice of regularly adding carbon to the plot, the accumulation could build a surplus that could last for... a long time. A superior selection of microbes might be available locally, too. And/or it may be that the 450 year fallow period also contributed to the strength of the colony.

 

[DirtMechanic]

The self sustaining/growing feature comes from the dying organisms. I see this as very much like a coral reef growing larger. I want to say it grows vertically something like a centimeter per year but I am not sure. It is a amazing ecosystem and I have the same clay and 60 inches of rain per year. I geek on getting something remotely close to that going in the yard.

 

[treeguy]

With 60" of rain, just add salt...

 

[treeguy]

The self sustaining/growing feature comes from the dying organisms. I see this as very much like a coral reef growing larger. I want to say it grows vertically something like a centimeter per year but I am not sure. It is a amazing ecosystem and I have the same clay and 60 inches of rain per year. I geek on getting something remotely close to that going in the yard.

....And the charcoal is a substitute for newly dying organisms just in case the microbes get hungry between meals...

 

[DirtMechanic]

....And the charcoal is a substitute for newly dying organisms just in case the microbes get hungry between meals...

No. Nothing eats the mineral. Thats why it can last the millenia. Its a helper to the other processes.

 

[treeguy]

You're forcing me to do some homework. Carbon is an element. It is the the hardest element. Charcoal in not a mineral, it is the concentrated carbon remains of once-living (organic) tissue minus most other compounds removed via pyrolisis. The C in a diamond is highly organized, chrystallized and has few impurities, but unorganized, non-crystallized, and has more impurities in charcoal, allowing the C to disassemble over time. Because charcoal is organic in origin, it is part of the food chain of microbes, one molecule at a time. Perhaps, most often the other element of that molecule is oxygen.
Your turn.

 

[DirtMechanic]

You're forcing me to do some homework. Carbon is an element. It is the the hardest element. Charcoal in not a mineral, it is the concentrated carbon remains of once-living (organic) tissue minus most other compounds removed via pyrolisis. The C in a diamond is highly organized, chrystallized and has few impurities, but unorganized, non-crystallized, and has more impurities in charcoal, allowing the C to disassemble over time. Because charcoal is organic in origin, it is part of the food chain of microbes, one molecule at a time. Perhaps, most often the other element of that molecule is oxygen.
Your turn.

A molecule might be recognizeable as charcoal. That being a molecule is the smallest recognizable organization of a substance. The heat purification that leaves the residual carbon structure open, and to which all of these other wonderful components of life are then able to be attached is basically the skeleton of carbon based life forms. It is elemental, and radiation and other effects cannot destroy it nor digest it and break it down even if ingested. The carbon base is so common there is even a graph paper for organic (carbon) chemistry students.